D&D General Anyone ever run (or played in) a campaign with entire party (or almost) was a single class?

[Eyes of Nine]

I was reading in another thread about the concept of 4 wizards and a fune... erm 4 wizards and a fighter. I have heard of all paladin parties, or all rogue parties. I have also considered running a campaign where it's all bards, and they are a "garage" band out trying to make their name in the fantasy world.

With all the various subclasses out there, it seems like these sort of concepts could work.

Has anyone ever intentionally or by accident run a game where the majority of the PCs were of a single class?

If yes, please describe how it went; challenges you didn't expect at the outset that came up, etc. If no but you are thinking of it - what fictional concepts are you considering to justify the party make-up (like my band idea)?

 

[JiffyPopTart]

The closest I have experienced is when our party consisted of two clerics of Torm, one Paladin of Torm, and a rogue as the party.

It was the best period of D&D we have had in our tables 20 years of gaming....exploring the politics of the church, focusing on running the temple, and having a built in common goal at character creation let us explore things in a different way than the usual "group of randoms who become an adventuring party."

The origin of the team was as such...
Player 1: I want to carry over my character from the last campaign (Headbusting Cleric of Torm)
Player 2: What if I created a different style of cleric (bookish vs. warlike) but picked Torm also?
Player 3: I was going to play a guard with anger management issues....what if I was a Paladin of Torm who was the "guard" in our temple?
Player 4: Yea...im just gonna be a rogue. Maybe I can be the go-between guy when you want to deal with the criminal underground?

 

[R_J_K75]

I always wanted to but it just never happened as I could never really get buy in from the players. I wanted to run a campaign where the players started a thieves guild from the ground up. If the players weren't all rogues theyd have to hire NPCs to fill other class requirements, i.e. spell casting, healing, and muscle or theyd multiclass. Another reason I never ran a campaign like this as it seemed the potential for it becoming limited and one dimensional, if not downright boring, might be pretty high. As a DM coming up with ideas to keep the game interesting might be taxing after while. If I did do this I would definitely design it to be a finite campaign from the start. Once the players achieved a certain goal or died then it would end.

 

[R_J_K75]

It was the best period of D&D we have had in our tables 20 years of gaming....exploring the politics of the church, focusing on running the temple, and having a built in common goal at character creation let us explore things in a different way than the usual "group of randoms who become an adventuring party."

This is exactly why I wanted to explore a campaign like this, the whole party made up of random people looking for treasure just because never sat well with me. Ive always hated it and quite frankly its just boring. PG2 Players Guide to the Forgotten Realms 2142 does a really cool example of a well thought out adventuring party.

 

[Undrave]

I'd love to play in a travelling band of bards who solve crime on the side XD

 

[JiffyPopTart]

This is exactly why I wanted to explore a campaign like this, the whole party made up of random people looking for treasure just because never sat well with me. Ive always hated it and quite frankly its just boring. PG2 Players Guide to the Forgotten Realms 2142 does a really cool example of a well thought out adventuring party.

The biggest downside of that era is that I have been "chasing the dragon" ever since trying to recapture lightning in a bottle of a similar experience. It was a perfect combination of...

-A grounded main story by the GM to keep us mainly at home instead of globetrotting.

-Enough side plots and mini systems incorporated to keep the temple day to day interesting.

-All 4 players contributing to the story...by write ups, designing buildings, NPCs, or even entire rules subsystems to do the things they were interested in (like a system to make a weekly series of rolls to determine our market share of the temple going crowd).

-Player buy in to create interparty conflict but only in the interest of good story.

One example is the two clerics having an hour long IRL discussion on Torms opinions on putting goblin heads on spikes as a warning to other goblins. This spun out into us exploring two radically different dogmas of thought in the same church. Another subplot later in the campaign was the efforts of two shady characters working for the thives guild taking advantage of my paladins short temper to try to "turn him" into working for their guild instead of against it by putting him in circumstances that forced him to "work their way" as a solution.

A further interesting part of the campaign was that it survived the 3.5 to 4e change , taking place in both systems with minimal interruptions....mostly just making some PCs into NPCs and vice versa.

 

[R_J_K75]

This spun out into us exploring two radically different dogmas of thought in the same church.

This was a consideration I had had for a campaign awhile back too. But again as you stressed it requires player buy in that I just didn't feel was enough to justify it. So it never did come to fruition but if I end up with the right players I would love to try this. I was running a FR campaign at the time, and was thinking a Lathander vs. Amaunator insurrection. Clerics of both deities would see things differently within their own clergy and from church to church sparking feuds. To make things worse with Amaunator returning to reclaim his portfolio there'd be a holy war between the two churches. I never did get any further than that initial concept though.

 

[Oofta]

The one and only time I DMed a group that was one class was Mages-R-Us back in 2E days. It ended in complete failure when a couple of low level thugs took the entire group out while the PCs were 3rd level. They only got that far because I used kid gloves when figuring out monsters.

It would probably be more viable in 5E. If they had ever gotten to a high enough level they may even have been quite powerful.

In any case, I can see it working with some classes but not all.

 

[iserith]

I'm currently in a game where the requirement was each of us take at least 1 level of bard because we're in a band called "Rage Against the Giants." It's fun to see what people come up with given this restraint. My character is Cowbell, a minotaur paladin 5/bard 6.

 

[JiffyPopTart]

This was a consideration I had had for a campaign awhile back too. But again as you stressed it requires player buy in that I just didn't feel was enough to justify it. So it never did come to fruition but if I end up with the right players I would love to try this. I was running a FR campaign at the time, and was thinking a Lathander vs. Amaunator insurrection. Clerics of both deities would see things differently within their own clergy and from church to church sparking feuds. To make things worse with Amaunator returning to reclaim his portfolio there'd be a holy war between the two churches. I never did get any further than that initial concept though.

Even in my homebrew I pretty much just imported the FR dieties. Why recreate the wheel when there is so much already written, and generally the different God's boil down to a sentence fragment mission statement like "we hate undead" or "we heal people".

Exploration of the different gods that don't get much focus is one of my favorite things to mine for GM and player story focus.

I once played a cleric/wizard of Savras who was a journeyman dedicated to "Storing every bit of knowledge that can be gained" which meant a demiplane that was a giant library accessed by any doorway using a special key where the world's network of Savras priest copied, organized, and compiled everything they learned on their journeys (AKA the Eldar Black Library from the 40k universe). This is so much more interesting than the mechanics of picking the Knowledge domain and getting a few extra spells to make you different than the cleric who picked Strength.

But all that came out of my buy in as a player and wanting to make something interesting. It didn't bear fruit because the GM at the time never used the hooks, because no other player had a tie to the library other than myself.